A Reporter Went to Great Lengths to Try and Find Nathan Fielder’s ‘Lost’ Movie
A lot of Nathan Fielder’s work seems to be shrouded in mystery these days — from the surreal ending of last year’s The Curse, to the upcoming second season of The Rehearsal, to the recent news that Fielder has been visiting Elizabeth Holmes in prison for a “top-secret” project that may be a documentary. Or perhaps just an article for The Diarrhea Times?
But possibly even more perplexing is the fact that Fielder helmed a feature film that’s barely seen the light of day. Tucked amongst his credits on the Internet Movie Database is a 2008 documentary, directed by Fielder, called Love and Cameras in America. According to the synopsis on IMDb, the film answers the question, “What happens when a man with virtually no experience making movies and no interest in politics is sent to make a documentary about the 2008 United States presidential election?” Noting that “for better or for worse, Halifax-based comedian Nathan Fielder is going to find out.”
But there hardly seem to be any evidence of this movie’s existence online. Hell, there’s more footage of Jerry Lewis’ unreleased Holocaust clown comedy than there is of Love and Cameras in America. So a journalist from Canada’s The Globe and Mail decided to try and track down a copy.
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Reporter Tom Cardoso went full Woodward and Bernstein (okay, maybe just Bernstein) in search of Love and Cameras in America because, as he points out, a lot of Fielder fans are passionate about seeing this movie. Well, at least whoever created the “Re-Release Love and Cameras in America (2008)” social media account definitely is.
The most thorough description of the movie can be found in an article that was published in the Halifax alt-weekly The Coast in 2009, back when the movie played at the Atlantic Film Festival.
Fielder, who at that point had recently left the Canadian comedy series This Hour Has 22 Minutes, told the outlet that the idea came from the film’s executive producer. “I told him right away that I didn’t know what I was doing. I had never done anything over five or six minutes, and this was unscripted and had to be an hour and a half. It was so daunting. I was overwhelmed,” Fielder confessed.
The article also describes that the movie, although it “features a brief encounter between Fielder and then-candidate Barack Obama” ultimately “has very little to do with the election, and everything to do with Fielder’s attempts to forge relationships with strangers.” This obviously sounds a lot like Fielder’s later work, as does the detail involving an awkward “mutual attraction” between the director and an aspiring actress who may or may not be taking advantage of the situation; ill-defined awkward romantic moments involving Fielder and his subjects became a recurring theme in Nathan for You.
Cardoso eventually tracked down the film’s executive producer who revealed that the project began as an hour-long TV election special, created purely to prove to the CBC’s head of comedy that Fielder was a “comedic genius” deserving of his own series. It didn’t work, so the footage was reworked as a documentary, and Fielder became “a poster-child for the inability of Canada to keep talent at home.”
While none of Fielder’s collaborators were able to produce a copy, the article did note that the movie’s current rights-holders, WildBrain, confirmed that they have the original master tapes. But they don’t want to spend the money digitizing it, because the company is “focused on kids and family content.”
It’s also very possible that Fielder himself wants to keep this project from being released, and is exerting his influence to ensure that it stays buried. Possibly with help from his close friend Barack Obama.
